Goya face swap

Where this one comes from

Goya painted himself around 1783, when he was in his late thirties, newly successful at the Spanish court and designing tapestry cartoons of picnics and parasols. The dark work everyone associates with his name — the war etchings, the black paintings on the walls of his house — was still decades away. In 1793 an illness left him permanently deaf, and nothing he made afterwards looks like this. The panel is in Agen, in south-western France.

What is in the picture

A small, dark, close-cropped head: black coat, white stock, hair back off a high forehead, and eyes that come straight out of the panel at you with no softening whatever. The handling is quick and the ground is left doing most of the work in the shadows. It is not a flattering self-portrait and it is not trying to be impressive; the man looking out is measuring you, which is roughly what he did to everyone he painted for the next forty years.

When people use it

For the picture taken before the thing happened. It works straight, as a plain and slightly wary portrait, and it works as a before, with whatever you like as the after.

How your face lands in it

A small head in strong contrast, lit narrowly from the front, with heavy shadow at the edges. That contrast is the thing to plan for — the result will be darker and harsher than the photograph you feed in. A straight-on picture with the eyes clearly visible matters more here than usual, because the eyes are what this template is.

Self-portrait — Francisco de Goya, c. 1783. Francisco de Goya died in 1828, so the painting is in the public domain and the museum photograph of it is published on that basis. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits